---
title: ‘The mice might dance on her and she would never catch one. — The Green Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘The mice might dance on her and she would never catch one. Who acts: mice, wife. A sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The War of the Wolf and the Fox, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Green Fairy Book, The War of the Wolf and the Fox, sentence 6

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‘The mice might dance on her and she would never catch one.

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**Who acts:** mice, wife · **What happens:** dance, not catch · **To what, where:** one

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This is a sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The War of the Wolf and the Fox. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (mice, wife), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**Parsed by Mova, not checked by a teacher.** This tree is Mova's own parse (the `en` model, on the CPU, when the site is built); it may be wrong.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg7277:53:6
# text = ‘The mice might dance on her and she would never catch one.
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	5	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
3	mice	mouse	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	5	nsubj	_	_
4	might	might	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	5	aux	_	_
5	dance	dance	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
6	on	on	ADP	IN	_	7	case	_	_
7	her	she	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Fem|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	5	obl	_	_
8	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	12	cc	_	_
9	she	she	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Fem|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	12	nsubj	_	_
10	would	would	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	12	aux	_	_
11	never	never	ADV	RB	PronType=Neg	12	advmod	_	_
12	catch	catch	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	5	conj	_	_
13	one	one	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	12	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **dance** | might | the mice |  |  |  |  | on wife | vn modes\_of\_being\_with\_motion-47.3 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme on she=Location |
| 2 | **not** **catch** | would | wife | one |  |  |  |  | vn get-13.5.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent one=Theme |

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One row per clause the reader finds. «not said here»: a role filled from the clause above. «roles by»: a VerbNet class and frame when one fits the verb, else the reader's rules on the tree.

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**Text:** «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 7277 (public domain in the USA). **Tree:** Mova's own parse, Elamur Cosmic License. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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